Great. Now everytime a teenager decides to blow up random shiat in the woods with old firecrackers and whatnot we're goung to immediately call it an IED and try to put it in the same class as roadside bombers, terrorists, etc...

Oh no, a kid playing with small explosives, the horror! It's nice that they call it an IED and not a homemade m-80 or anything, cause we all know that teens have no interest in small explosions just for fun and are perfectly happy to leave fireworks to the professionals. He must have been plotting something terrible!

/almost blew myself up on more than one occasion//still have all 6 fingers

The only dumb thing he did was keep it in his room. Shoulda put it in the shed or garage. I'm glad not to be a kid today, any little thing they do they are a terrorist and have a criminal record that is splashed all over the world in a day.

Who cares how many they found? IED is such an overused blanket term that these could range anywhere from a cardboard tube with some gunpowder in it to a few hundred pounds of ammonium nitrate. Guess which one kids are most likely to have, and which would make more sense to have multiple laying around. Until there's a description with some substance above "IED", it's impossible to say what exactly the intent was.

sethen320:Great. Now everytime a teenager decides to blow up random shiat in the woods with old firecrackers and whatnot we're goung to immediately call it an IED and try to put it in the same class as roadside bombers, terrorists, etc...

I'm tired of that term. Its being overused.

Well, let's be fair. It's a device of some type, yes? OK. So "D" is correct.

It's an explosive- at least, that's what it's supposed to be. An explosive device. An "ED" as it were.

It wasn't store-bought. It was homemade. I don't know if "improvised" is the absolute best way to describe the device, though. So I'm with you- these should be called "HEDs".

To tell you the truth, I'm on the fence about this one. Having been an eighteen year old, I know how fun blowing shiat up is. On the other hand, you can never tell which kid is going to go nuts and try to kill a bunch of people. I never really made a "bomb" but I Loved illegal fireworks, and knew people who blew up trees and cars in the woods for fun. ...And that's the thing, it is fun, the best kind of fun, the kind that kids aren't allowed to have anymore: dangerous fun. I find it suspicious that the picture of the "IED" was replaced with a Wile E Coyote time bomb. I'd understand if it was a pipe bomb, or a stick of dynamite wrapped with nails, but I'm guessing it's more like a home made cherry bomb. FTA: ...authorities say. "It was something that wasn't big, but could cause serious injuries and the death of someone,"Well, I guess that rules out a black cat, but nothing much larger. I bet the judge will throw the book at him just to be on the safe side.

They would have put us away a long time ago if they had known about some of our 80's teenage explosive exploits. Home-made bottle rockets with nose cone warhead (with accompanying double-barrelled, shoulder-mounted, electrically-fired rocket gun), cherry bombs, frag grenades, etc. We even had access to our own supply of home made black powder (the drug store owner thought nothing of selling us a huge supply of Potassium Nitrate). Running from the RCMP on Halloween night was a right of passage. We would tell our parents that it was for SCIENCE (which, in a roundabout way, it was).

/No, you may not short-cut across my yard.//eyebrows and Cabbage Patch Kids were the only victims

Gonz:sethen320: Great. Now everytime a teenager decides to blow up random shiat in the woods with old firecrackers and whatnot we're goung to immediately call it an IED and try to put it in the same class as roadside bombers, terrorists, etc...

I'm tired of that term. Its being overused.

Well, let's be fair. It's a device of some type, yes? OK. So "D" is correct.

It's an explosive- at least, that's what it's supposed to be. An explosive device. An "ED" as it were.

It wasn't store-bought. It was homemade. I don't know if "improvised" is the absolute best way to describe the device, though. So I'm with you- these should be called "HEDs".

I get it. I just think that the media is being irresponsible because while we know that they are technically correct, they are fully aware that the general public thinks about much more than a cherry bomb when they hear "IED".

They are acting irresponsibly and possibly ruining a teens entire life just to get clicks. They have no actual data, only buzzwords.

FTA: "Prater's parents told police he would go to the desert and make soda bottle bombs with his friends and blow them up there, Pooley said. The parents believe their son made such devices just for recreational purposes."

I'm closing in on twice that age, but I still remember being an 18-year-old male. And had I access to bomb-making chemicals, and had I lived somewhere with less than 20,000 people per square mile and thus had access to some open area I could blow stuff up in without interrupting a Little League game, I would have had multiple homemade bombs in my bedroom at all times. As it was, I only occasionally made homemade fireworks-type explosives to set off in the parking lot at 3am.

Ego edo infantia cattus:To tell you the truth, I'm on the fence about this one. Having been an eighteen year old, I know how fun blowing shiat up is. On the other hand, you can never tell which kid is going to go nuts and try to kill a bunch of people. I never really made a "bomb" but I Loved illegal fireworks, and knew people who blew up trees and cars in the woods for fun. ...And that's the thing, it is fun, the best kind of fun, the kind that kids aren't allowed to have anymore: dangerous fun. I find it suspicious that the picture of the "IED" was replaced with a Wile E Coyote time bomb. I'd understand if it was a pipe bomb, or a stick of dynamite wrapped with nails, but I'm guessing it's more like a home made cherry bomb. FTA: ...authorities say. "It was something that wasn't big, but could cause serious injuries and the death of someone,"Well, I guess that rules out a black cat, but nothing much larger. I bet the judge will throw the book at him just to be on the safe side.

That's the problem, they just group them all together and call anything that explodes a weapon of mass destruction and give them 10 years for even thinking of having such a device. But get caught with a gun and you get a slap on the wrist unless they can prove you were planning to or actively trying/succeeding at killing somebody. Having made considered making a few explosives myself there were more than capable of killing in the right circumstances, I can tell you that possession alone does not convey an intent to cause anybody harm. It means you had access to gunpowder and, hey, look at this piece of PVC! Let's go make a hole in the ground while we cower behind a tree!

"...the woman showed police photos she had taken of other suspicious items in the teen's room..."

Note to self: when hiring a cleaning service, have them sign a contractually binding agreement with liquidated damages and attorney fee clause stating that they will not take pictures of anything in my house.

quansem:They would have put us away a long time ago if they had known about some of our 80's teenage explosive exploits. Home-made bottle rockets with nose cone warhead (with accompanying double-barrelled, shoulder-mounted, electrically-fired rocket gun), cherry bombs, frag grenades, etc. We even had access to our own supply of home made black powder (the drug store owner thought nothing of selling us a huge supply of Potassium Nitrate). Running from the RCMP on Halloween night was a right of passage. We would tell our parents that it was for SCIENCE (which, in a roundabout way, it was).

/No, you may not short-cut across my yard.//eyebrows and Cabbage Patch Kids were the only victims

Seconded. The rarity of an "IED" in a 14-year-old's room is only due to the more complex definition of something like a roadside IED. If they define that as anything else, it's pretty damn common even if the parents don't know about it..

Back in my day we jumped of railroad bridges with a knife in one hand and a gun in the other while the bottle rockets attached to our belts went off. Never could achieve the necessary thrust to remain aloft. But at least when we hit the water we had the knife to fight off the alligators..... Kids are a buncha pantywaists these days...

cwheelie:Back in my day we jumped of railroad bridges with a knife in one hand and a gun in the other while the bottle rockets attached to our belts went off. Never could achieve the necessary thrust to remain aloft. But at least when we hit the water we had the knife to fight off the alligators..... Kids are a buncha pantywaists these days...

cwheelie:Back in my day we jumped of railroad bridges with a knife in one hand and a gun in the other while the bottle rockets attached to our belts went off. Never could achieve the necessary thrust to remain aloft. But at least when we hit the water we had the knife to fight off the alligators..... Kids are a buncha pantywaists these days...

NO, kid's parents are the pantywaists. Kids would still do all that if they could.

Ego edo infantia cattus:cwheelie: Back in my day we jumped of railroad bridges with a knife in one hand and a gun in the other while the bottle rockets attached to our belts went off. Never could achieve the necessary thrust to remain aloft. But at least when we hit the water we had the knife to fight off the alligators..... Kids are a buncha pantywaists these days...

For some odd reason, I really want to believe your story.

here's the true part - we'd take turns jumping off the bridge while our buddies shot the bottle rockets at us. No alligators were harmed, it was Virginia in the late 60's early 70's.Good times

Meh, both my brothers did stupid asplodey stuff when we were kids. The older one, through brains or dumb luck, at least never did any real damage. The younger one once necessitated a pretty good sized fire department respose. Oops. Different times, those were.

We cut he heads off strike-anywhere matches and crammed them into a tennis ball, taped it shut, and tossed it out in the dry lake beds outside our desert town when I was around that age. We burned through a lot of bottle rockets, too. These days we would be terrorists, apparently.